Archive

Quotes

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

—David Foster Wallace, 2000

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

—Frederick Douglass, 1855

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

—Tacitus, c. 117

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

—Dean Acheson, 1970

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

—George Borrow, 1843

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

—Anthony Burgess, 1972